How Good and Pleasant

Read Psalm 133 in full before proceeding; it is only three verses. Sit with its two images, the anointing oil and the mountain dew, and ask what they tell us about the unity of God’s people and where that unity comes from. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

Indeed that is where the LORD has decreed a blessing will be available: eternal life.
Psalm 133:3

We come to the last of the Songs of Ascents we will study, and it is one of the shortest psalms in the book, three verses, and one of the loveliest. Having arrived, in the last psalm, at the house of the LORD with the gathered tribes, the pilgrim now looks around at the people gathered with him and is moved to praise the simple, profound goodness of their being together. Look! How good and how pleasant it is when brothers live together! (v. 1). (Older translations render the line when brothers dwell in unity, and the Hebrew carries both ideas: a shared dwelling and a oneness.) It is a psalm about the unity of God’s people: the sweetness of the family of faith living together as one.

It is a theme our age needs as much as any. We live in a time of remarkable isolation, people more connected by their devices and more alone in their souls than perhaps any generation before, hungry for belonging and unsure where to find it. And into that loneliness the gospel speaks a startling word: that those who are joined to Christ are joined to a family, given brothers and sisters, set within a people who are meant to dwell together. The Christian is not saved into solitude but into a household. We have seen this thread run all through the volume (the believer who must not walk his darkness alone, the pilgrim who travels in company, the worshiper glad to go up with others to the house of the LORD), and here it comes to its sweetest expression. To belong to Christ is to belong, with all His people, to one another; and that belonging, Psalm 133 says, is among the good and pleasant gifts of God.

And David, who wrote it, does not merely state that this unity is good; he paints it, with two of the most memorable images in the Psalter. The first is the precious anointing oil poured on the head of Aaron the high priest, so abundant that it runs down over his beard and onto the collar of his robes. The second is the dew of Mount Hermon, the great snow-capped peak of the north, falling on the hills of Zion in the south. An anointing and a dew: we will find that both pictures are doing the same quiet work, and pointing in the same direction.

For the thing to notice about both images, before anything else, is that they move downward. The oil does not rise up from the robes to the head; it is poured on the head and flows down. The dew does not climb up from Zion to Hermon; it flows down from the heights onto the hills below. And both are abundant: the oil running, running, the dew of the great mountain falling freely. This is the secret the psalm means to teach about the unity of God’s people: that it is not something we manufacture from below, by our own effort and agreeableness, but something that comes down, a gift poured out from above, flowing from a source higher than ourselves.

And that source, the gospel will show us, has a name. The oil flows down from the head; and the church has a Head, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Anointed One, on whom God poured out the Spirit, not sparingly but in fullness, and from whom that anointing flows down over all His body. The unity Psalm 133 celebrates is finally not the achievement of agreeable people but the overflow of Christ’s own anointing, running down from the Head over every member joined to Him. This is the key that unlocks the psalm, and we will keep it in hand throughout.

So we will look, with David, at how good and pleasant unity is; we will watch the oil run down from Aaron’s head and the dew fall on Zion, and learn where the church’s unity comes from; and we will hear the blessing the psalm crowns it with: that there, where God’s people live together as one, the LORD has decreed a blessing will be available: eternal life. After the gladness of the gathering, we close the Ascents with the blessing of dwelling together as one.

Look! How good and how pleasant it is when brothers live together! (v. 1). The psalm opens with a summons to look (Look!, older translations Behold), as though David is pointing at something and asking us to stop and take it in. And what he points at he describes with two words that belong together but are not the same. It is good: right, fitting, the way things ought to be, beneficial to all who share in it. And it is pleasant: delightful, sweet, lovely to experience. Some good things are not especially pleasant, and some pleasant things are not especially good; the unity of God’s people is both at once. It is morally good, the very thing God designed His people for, and it is sweet to live in, a genuine delight. To dwell among brothers and sisters who are truly one is to taste something both right and lovely.

We should not miss the little word when, because it carries a quiet realism. David does not say brothers always live together as one, as though it were automatic; he says how good it is when they do, which tells us, gently, that they do not always. Unity is precious precisely because it is not guaranteed. The family of faith, like every family, is capable of division, friction, and feud; the history of God’s people, then and since, is littered with quarrels and splits. So when brothers do dwell in unity, it is a thing worth beholding, worth pointing at, worth celebrating: a small wonder, not a given. David is not describing the ordinary; he is praising the precious.

And it is worth pausing on the word the NET renders live together (older translations, dwell), for it means more than a passing visit. The pilgrims of the Ascents came up to Jerusalem for the festivals and then went home; but the psalm speaks of brothers who live together, dwelling side by side and sharing a common life over time. Unity that is good and pleasant is not the fleeting warmth of a single gathering, pleasant as that is, but the settled life of a people who belong to one another, who stay, who bear with one another and build a common life under God. That kind of dwelling-together is harder and rarer and far more precious than a moment’s harmony, and it is exactly what God means His church to be.

We should be clear, too, about what this unity is and is not, for the word is easily misunderstood. The unity the psalm praises is not uniformity, not a flattening of God’s people into sameness of gifts, temperament, and custom, where every member must be a copy of every other. That is not the unity of a body but the monotony of a machine. The New Testament’s own picture of the church is a body of many different members (eyes and hands and feet, each unlike the others, each needed precisely because it is different), knit into one by a common life. True unity is more like a choir than a single sustained note: many distinct voices, high and low, blended into one harmony that no single voice could make alone. So the brothers dwelling in unity are not brothers who have erased their differences of gift and calling, but brothers whose differences are held together in love, under one Head, by one Spirit, in one confession of the faith. Nor is it the opposite error, a unity that shrugs at doctrine and calls that love. Our confession puts the line exactly where Scripture puts it: for the true unity of the church it is enough to agree concerning the teaching of the gospel and the administration of the sacraments, while human traditions and ceremonies need not be alike everywhere (AC VII). The peace of the church is not the silence of a graveyard but the harmony of a living, varied, reconciled people gathered around one gospel and one table, and that is harder, and lovelier, than mere sameness.

And every true taste of it now is an advance taste of heaven. For the unity of God’s people in this age, real and sweet as it can be, is still partial and still fragile, but it points toward a unity that will one day be perfect and unbreakable. John saw it: an enormous crowd that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people, and language, standing together before the throne, one people at last, with every division healed and every wall down. That is where the brothers dwelling in unity are finally headed: to the new Jerusalem, where the whole redeemed family of God will dwell together forever in unbroken peace. So when we glimpse genuine unity here, among a particular gathering of God’s people in a particular place, we are not merely enjoying a present good; we are tasting, in advance, the great togetherness of the world to come. How good and pleasant it is now is only the first sip of how good and pleasant it will be then.

The Oil on Aaron’s Head

It is like fine oil poured on the head which flows down the beard, Aaron’s beard, and then flows down his garments (v. 2). This is no ordinary oil. It is the holy anointing oil, the fragrant and costly oil that God commanded be made for one purpose: to consecrate the priests and the holy things, to set them apart for God. And here it is poured on the head of Aaron, the high priest, in such abundance that it does not stay on his head but runs down, down over his beard, down further onto his priestly garments, until the whole man, head to vestments, is covered and fragrant with the consecrating oil. David lingers on the flowing: flows down … flows down. It is a picture of lavish, unstinting abundance, of blessing poured out so freely that it overflows and covers everything beneath it.

So unity, David says, is like this, and the likeness is rich. Unity among God’s people is precious and consecrating, like the holy oil; it is no cheap or common thing but something set apart, fragrant, holy. And it is abundant and overflowing, running down to cover all. But the deepest note in the image is the direction: the oil is poured on the head, and flows down from there over the whole body. The blessing originates at the head and descends to cover everything joined to it. Aaron’s beard and robes did not anoint themselves; they were covered because the oil came down from the head.

And here the gospel opens the image wide. Aaron was the anointed high priest, but he was only ever a shadow of the great High Priest to come. The Lord Jesus is the Anointed One (that is what the words Messiah and Christ mean, the Anointed), upon whom the Spirit descended at His baptism and rested, the One whom, the Scriptures say, God anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power, the One to whom God does not give the Spirit sparingly. He is the Head of the church, His body; and the anointing poured upon Him, the Holy Spirit, flows down from Him, the Head, over all His members. This is why the church is one: not because we are alike or agreeable, but because one and the same Spirit, poured out on our Head, runs down over every one of us, anointing the whole body from the top. The believer shares in Christ’s anointing (you have an anointing from the Holy One, John tells the church) because he is joined to the anointed Head, and the oil that was poured on Him runs down even to us.

And mark how far down the oil runs. On Aaron it flowed from the head over the beard and onto his very garments; it did not stop partway but reached the lowest edge. So the anointing of Christ does not rest on the church’s leaders alone, or trickle out before it reaches the ordinary believer; it runs all the way down, covering every member of the body. The New Testament dares to say of the whole church what was once said only of the priests: you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and you have an anointing from the Holy One, and you all know. Every believer, joined to the anointed Head, shares in His anointing; the Spirit poured on Christ reaches even to the least and lowliest of His people. This is a great dignity and a great leveler at once. There are no second-class members of the body over whom the oil never reached; the same Spirit anoints the whole church from the Head down to the hem, and so binds the high and the low, the prominent and the obscure, into one anointed people. The unity of the church is the unity of a body all of which has been touched by the same oil.

Like the Dew of Hermon

It is like the dew of Hermon, which flows down upon the hills of Zion (v. 3). The second image is drawn from the land itself. Mount Hermon, far to the north, rises high and snow-capped, and its heights are famous for heavy dew, moisture so abundant it drenches the slopes each morning. Zion, to the south, is dry hill country, where dew means the difference between life and barrenness. To say that the dew of Hermon flows down upon the hills of Zion is to speak of a great and unlikely refreshment: the abundance of the northern heights coming down to water the southern hills, bringing life where there would otherwise be drought.

Dew, in that land, is not a pretty garnish; it is survival. Through the rainless months it is the dew that keeps the crops alive, that waters the ground when no rain falls. So to liken unity to dew is to say that the unity of God’s people is life-giving: refreshing, reviving, the very moisture by which the people of God flourish. And the opposite is just as true: where there is division, things dry up. A divided people is a parched people; bitterness and faction wither the soul and the fellowship alike. But where the brothers dwell in unity, there is freshness, growth, life, the dew falling on the hills and making them green.

And once again, mark the motion: the dew flows down. Like the oil, it comes down from above. The refreshment of unity is not something the dry hills of Zion produce for themselves; it descends on them as a gift from the heights. So the two images agree perfectly. Unity is like oil that runs down from the head and like dew that falls from the mountain: precious and consecrating, refreshing and life-giving, and in both cases a gift that comes down from above, not a product manufactured below. And the One who sends it is the same in both pictures: the Spirit poured out on our Head runs down as anointing oil and falls on us as the dew of heaven, the living water by which the whole body is refreshed and made to live.

And we taste this refreshment in the most ordinary ways, wherever the body of Christ truly dwells together. It is the dew of an encouraging word from a brother when our own faith has gone dry; the refreshment of a burden shared, of being prayed for by name, of sitting beside fellow believers who hold us up when our hands hang down. The New Testament describes the body as a thing that grows in love as each one does its part, each member supplying what the others lack, so that the whole grows and flourishes, and that mutual upbuilding is the dew of Hermon falling on Zion in daily practice. None of us flourishes in isolation; the soul left to itself grows parched. But set among the people of God, watered by their love and their prayers and their truth-telling, refreshed by the same Spirit that refreshes them, the believer is kept green. The dew that falls on the church falls on each of us through one another, which is one more reason the people of God are not meant to live cut off and alone, drying out apart from the fellowship that was meant to refresh them.

There the LORD Commanded the Blessing

And the psalm ends with a line that gathers up everything and crowns it: Indeed that is where the LORD has decreed a blessing will be available: eternal life (v. 3). There, in the place where the brothers live together as one, where the oil runs down and the dew falls, there the LORD has set His blessing. Not merely permitted it, or offered it, but decreed it, commanded it, ordered it to be present. (Older translations say there the LORD has commanded the blessing, life forevermore.) The unity of God’s people is the appointed place of God’s blessing; where His people are one, He has ordained that His blessing will be found.

And what blessing? Not a small one. Eternal life: life that does not end. The psalm reaches, in its final words, past every earthly good to the very gift of everlasting life, and locates it there, in the unity of God’s people. This is a breathtaking thing to say, and it would be hard to understand were it not for the gospel that fulfills it. For the unity of the church is not a club we join or a mood we generate; it is, at its root, our common union with Christ the Head. To dwell in the unity of God’s people is to be joined to the body of which Christ is the Head, and to be joined to Him is to share His life, the life that is in his Son, eternal life. The blessing decreed there is the blessing of being in Christ together: and in Christ is eternal life.

So the line is not saying that being agreeable earns us heaven, as though unity were a good work that purchased eternal life. It is saying something deeper and sweeter: that the place where the people of God are gathered as one in Christ is the place where the life of Christ is found, that the blessing of eternal life flows, like the oil and the dew, from the Head down over the body that is joined to Him. To belong to the one people of God, united to the one Head, is to stand exactly where the LORD has decreed His blessing to fall. There is no richer place to be.

It is worth pressing on that little word there, because it tells us where to look for the blessing. We are forever tempted to seek God’s blessing in isolation: alone with our private devotions, our individual pursuit of Him, apart from the inconvenient fellowship of other sinners. But the psalm says the blessing is decreed there, in the place where the brothers live together. The Lord Jesus said much the same: where two or three are assembled in my name, I am there among them. He did not say where one withdraws by himself; He located His promised presence in the gathering. And it is in the gathering that He has put His chief means of blessing: the word preached aloud to the congregation, the water of baptism that joins us to the body, the bread and cup shared at the one table. The believer who wants the blessing God has decreed will not find its fullness off by himself; he finds it there, among the people of God, where Christ has promised to be and where His gifts are given. To dwell in the unity of the church is to live in the very place where the LORD has appointed His blessing to fall.

And we can see why the blessing should be life in particular, once we remember how the life of the body works. The Lord Jesus said, I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in me, and I in him, bears much fruit, because apart from me you can accomplish nothing. The life of the branches is not their own; it flows into them from the vine, and a branch cut off from the vine simply withers and dies. So it is with the members of Christ’s body. The life we have is His life, flowing from the Head into all who are joined to Him, and to dwell in the unity of His people is to abide in the place where that life flows. This is why eternal life is decreed there: not because the fellowship generates life of its own, but because the fellowship is the body through which the Head’s own life courses. To be cut off from the body, to wander away from the people of God into a solitary religion of one’s own, is to risk withering like a branch broken off; to dwell in the united body is to stay where the sap of eternal life still runs. The blessing is life, because the Head is life, and His life reaches every member that remains in Him.

The Unity That Flows from the Head

Let us gather the whole psalm into its gospel center, for it changes everything about how we pursue the unity it praises. The unity of the church is not, first of all, a project we accomplish; it is a gift we receive, poured out from the Head, falling like dew from above. The night before He died, the Lord Jesus prayed for it: that they will all be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I am in you. I pray that they will be in us. And He did not only pray it; He purchased it. By His cross He broke down the wall of division and reconciled estranged sinners in one body to God, making, the apostle says, one new man where there had been hostility and division. The unity of the church was bought with blood and prayed for with tears by the Head Himself.

And it is the Spirit, the anointing oil running down from the Head, who actually makes the many one. In one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, Paul writes; there is one body and one Spirit … one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. The church’s oneness is the Spirit’s work, accomplished through the very means God has given: the one word preached, the one baptism that joins us to Christ, the one table where we are made one loaf and one body. This is why our confession finds the church, and her unity, where the gospel is purely preached and the sacraments are rightly administered (AC VII), and not in shared feelings or in agreeing to set doctrine aside. Our catechism confesses this exactly when it teaches that the Holy Spirit calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth, and keeps it united with the Lord Jesus Christ in the one true faith. The unity is the Spirit’s gathering of a people around their Head, and He does it through His ordinary, appointed means.

Does this mean, then, that since unity is God’s gift, we may be careless about it? Just the opposite. Because unity is the Spirit’s precious gift, flowing from Christ’s own anointing, we are charged to guard it with all our might, making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. We do not manufacture the unity; we keep it. We do not create the oneness; we keep from tearing what Christ has made one. And this is sobering, given how casually the people of God so often wound and divide the body for which He died. To despise the fellowship of the church, to walk away from it lightly, to sow division among the brothers, is to treat with contempt a thing Christ prayed for, bled for, and poured out His Spirit to create. The believer who has understood Psalm 133 handles the unity of the church as the holy and fragile and costly thing it is.

And there is a reason the stakes are so high, beyond even the sweetness of the thing itself: the unity of God’s people is the church’s witness to the world. The Lord Jesus said it twice in those last hours with His disciples: that everyone will know we are His disciples if we have love for one another, and that He prayed for our unity so that the world will believe that the Father had sent Him. The watching world reads the gospel, in part, off the life of the church; a people who genuinely dwell in unity, loving across every line that ordinarily divides, are a living argument for the truth of Christ, while a quarrelsome and divided church is a stumbling block laid in the path of those who might believe. So the oil running down and the dew falling are not for the church’s private enjoyment alone. The unity that flows from the Head is meant to overflow as testimony: a city set on a hill, a people whose love for one another says to the world, look! How good and how pleasant, and points beyond itself to the One who made them one.

And so we close the Ascents where the pilgrim road was always leading: not to a solitary summit, but to a people, gathered, anointed, refreshed, dwelling together as one under their Head, in the place where God has decreed His blessing. The lonely individual is not the picture of the redeemed life that the Psalms hold up. The picture is brothers dwelling in unity, the oil running down over all of them from the anointed Head, the dew of heaven falling on them together, and over the whole gathered company the LORD’s own decreed blessing: eternal life. How good and pleasant it is. Behold it, and give thanks, and guard it well.

Gathering the Threads

We closed the Songs of Ascents with the short and lovely Psalm 133, and found in three verses a whole theology of the church’s unity. David bids us look at how good and pleasant it is when brothers live together as one (good and pleasant both, morally right and genuinely sweet), and the little word when reminded us that such unity is precious precisely because it is not automatic, a small wonder rather than a given, the settled dwelling-together of a people who belong to one another and stay. He painted it in two images that both move downward and overflow: the holy oil running down from Aaron’s head over his beard and garments, and the dew of Hermon flowing down upon the hills of Zion. Both are precious and consecrating, refreshing and life-giving, and in both cases a gift poured out from above, not manufactured below.

And the gospel gave both images their center. The oil runs down from the head, and the church has a Head, the Lord Jesus, the Anointed One, on whom God poured out the Spirit, not sparingly but in fullness, and from whom that anointing flows down over all His body, so that the church is one not by our likeness but by His Spirit running down over us all. The dew falls as the same Spirit’s refreshing life. And there, in the unity of the people joined to their Head, the LORD has decreed the blessing of eternal life, not as a wage earned by our agreeableness, but as the life of Christ shared by all who are joined to Him. We saw that He prayed for this unity and bought it with His cross, that the Spirit creates it through word and font and table, and that our part is therefore not to manufacture it but to keep it, guarding as holy and costly the oneness Christ died to give. So the pilgrim road ends not at a solitary summit but among a people, gathered under their anointed Head, refreshed by the dew of heaven, standing in the place where God has decreed His blessing. How good and pleasant it is.

For Discussion

The psalm bids us look at how good and how pleasant it is when brothers live together (v. 1). What does that little word when suggest about how common (or how easily lost) such unity is, and why is it worth pausing to celebrate when it is found?
The first image is the anointing oil poured on Aaron’s head, flowing down over his beard and garments (v. 2). What does it mean that the oil flows down from the head, and how does that picture the church’s unity flowing from Christ, her anointed Head, rather than being manufactured from below (consider Ephesians 4:15–16)?
The second image is the dew of Hermon flowing down upon Zion (v. 3), and in a dry land, dew means life. How is the unity of God’s people life-giving and refreshing, and what tends to dry up where there is division instead?
Both pictures move downward (oil flowing down, dew flowing down), and both are abundant. What does that tell us about where Christian unity comes from: is it mainly something we achieve, or something we receive (compare 1 Corinthians 12:13)?
That is where the LORD has decreed a blessing will be available: eternal life (v. 3). Why does God connect His blessing, even eternal life, to the place where His people live together as one, and what does that say about the importance of belonging to the fellowship of the church?
The Lord Jesus prayed that they will all be one (John 17:21) and made us one by His cross (Ephesians 2:14–16). How does it change the way we pursue unity to know that it is finally His gift and His work, and yet something we are charged to keep … in the bond of peace (Ephesians 4:3)?

Looking Ahead

With Psalm 133 we leave the Songs of Ascents, and turn to a new movement in our journey through the Psalter: the great psalms of trust and praise. And we begin with the most beloved psalm in the whole book, perhaps the most beloved passage in all of Scripture: Psalm 23. The LORD is my shepherd, I lack nothing (Psalm 23:1). After all the crowds and the cities and the gathered tribes, we come to a psalm of the quietest intimacy, a single sheep and its shepherd, walking together through lush pastures and dark valleys alike.

We will follow the Shepherd through every line: the lush pastures and refreshing water, the right paths, the darkest valley where I fear no danger, for you are with me, the feast prepared in plain sight of enemies, and the goodness and faithfulness that pursue us all our days. And we will meet the Shepherd Himself, for the Lord Jesus took this very psalm onto His own lips and made it His name: I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. After the keeping of Psalm 121 and the gathering of the Ascents, we will rest, with David, beside the refreshing water, and learn to say with him, I lack nothing.

Read Psalm 23 in full before the next session; it is only six verses, and you may well know it by heart. Read it slowly, as if for the first time, and notice how the Shepherd is with His sheep through the lush pastures and the darkest valley alike.

Closing Prayer

O LORD our God, we behold with wonder how good and pleasant it is when Your people dwell together in unity, and we confess how often we have torn what You have joined, wounding by our quarrels and our pride the body for which Your Son died. Forgive us, and make us one. We thank You that this unity is not ours to manufacture but Yours to give, poured out like the holy oil from the head of our great High Priest, the Lord Jesus, the Anointed One, and falling like the dew of heaven upon us by Your Spirit, who calls and gathers and keeps Your whole church in the one true faith.
We bless You that Your Son prayed that we might all be one, and bought our oneness with His blood, breaking down every wall of division to make of us one new people in Himself. Pour out His anointing afresh over all His body; refresh Your divided and weary church with the dew of Your Spirit; and make us eager to maintain the unity You have given, in the bond of peace. Keep us together in the place where You have commanded Your blessing, and grant us, with all Your people, the blessing You have promised there: life forevermore. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, our anointed Head, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.